Flight from Iraq by Nir Rosen, New York Times Magazine

The article makes several comparisons of Iraqi refugees to Palestinians. Unfortunately it makes no mention of the fact that the Palestinians became refugees due to a war launched by Arab countries seeking to destroy the State of Israel after it was created by United Nations vote. The article also fails to mention the nearly 1 million Jewish refugees who were expelled by Arab countries after 1948, who lived in Jewish communities throughout the region for more than 2,500 years. Today there are approximately only 30,000 Jews remaining in those lands while nearly 1.5 million Arabs live in Israel.

The Jewish refugees were forced to abandon virtually all of their property, especially as they fled from the most hostile countries of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. About 600,000 of them were gradually absorbed and integrated into Israeli society without any assistance from the United Nations. The Arabs who fled Israel were not welcomed and are still not welcomed in their fellow Arab lands, despite the vast size of those lands especially in comparison to the size of Israel. Ever since they have lived in refugee camps managed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Not the Holocaust before nor subsequent genocides or ongoing world strife since have warranted the creation of another relief agency dedicated to the continuous maintenance of a single people as refugees. They are still denied citizenship and basic rights including the right to work by their hosts.

One hopes that Iraqi refugees will not suffer a similar fate at the hands of their fellow peoples or the UN.

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